Entertainment

Zoho Writer Gets Offline Editing

Zoho Writer made its tools available offline through Google Gears a few months back, but the offline capabilities were limited to read-only functions. Now both view and edit options are available for Zoho Offline, through Google Gears. So you'll need to first download Google Gears if you don't already have it. From there, you'll be able to access your documents offline.

There's a new option in your Zoho Writer toolbar that lets you choose "offline" mode. Once clicked, Zoho will download the 15 documents based on your left-hand document order for you to work with offline. If you need more, you can select to have up to 25 documents downloaded for offline use. This may be suitable for most users, but for those that use Zoho Writer in a more extensive manner, this may not be enough access for offline use. I frequently search through previous documents for fact-checking and other reasons, and would need access to more than 25 documents. But with some creative finagling, most users should be able to work around these limitations.

For editing purposes, you'll find that some of the recently added features like pagination are included in the new offline mode, but also, about half of the tools don't work for offline mode. These are generally online-specific functions, such as emoticons, comments, etc. Hopefully all of these will be added into the offline mode for Zoho writer, because even if they are Internet-specific, it could still be helpful to use these tools and have them activated once you switch back into online mode. Especially functions like comments. And once you do switch back into online mode, you'll be granted the option of using any edited documents as the latest versions.

As the pressure mounts for offline access for various Internet-based applications, Google and Microsoft seem to be at the head of the race, with companies like Adobe becoming very involved as well. With Microsoft's recent Sync Framework, which is said to be the company's answer to Google Gears, we'll see how the competition heats up and how it will affect services like Zoho. So far it looks like Zoho is pretty dedicated to Google Gears, though it's always incorporated appealing tools for Microsoft users as well.

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